• The main topics from 2011
• The most popular posts of 2011
• The most clicked pictures of 2011
• My favorite 2011 posts
• And some plans for 2012

2011 post topics

This year I wrote less about growing  and more about cleaning and storing  specific crops

• Radishes
• Turnips
• Beans
• Brassicas (also here)
• Garlic  (curing and  storage)

I wrote about two farm I visited

• Southern Exposure Seeds
• Even’star Organic Farm

and seed tools and techniques I use

• Modified  winnowing buckets
• Growing lettuce under tunnels
• Seed packing scoops (also Filling seed packets)
• Improving varieties
• 10 steps to clean seeds 

I also wrote a series on planning for seed production.

Most popular posts of 2011

The three most popular post were

1. Building caterpillar tunnels
2. Harvesting garlic bulbils
3. Growing chufa nuts

Interestingly they are all posts from 2010.

The 5 most popular posts written in 2011 were

1. Visiting Even’star Organic Farm
2. Garlic storage
3. The 2011 Tourne-Sol seed catalog
4. Saving bean seeds
5. And the Ste-Anne garlic festival

Most Clicked Pictures of 2011

1. Sprinklers
2. Drip Tape
3. Hooks to support plastic in caterpillar tunnels
4. Mizuna plants
5. Caterpillar tunnel ridge line

Folks love irrigation and tunnels! Again the most clicked photos in 2011 were all from 2010 posts.

Here are the most clicked photos from 2011 posts

1. Seed scoops
2. Winnowing bean seeds

My favorite 2011 posts

My favorite posts this past year was comparing spring 2011 and 2010. It wasn’t until I compared images from the same dates in both years that I really could understand how different the weather had been.

My other favorite post was about the seed packing scoops I’d acquired. I loved writing how 15 scoops smaller than a teaspoon were going to change my life. I also loved that when I saw Patrice Fortier (from La Société des Plantes) at the Seedy Saturday in Montreal he told me that right after reading the post he ordered his own set.

Plans for 2012

I realize I’ve posted less in 2011 than 2010. It’s been a busy year and much of my writing energy was diverted into two other directions:

• the new Tourne-Sol website,  which will be up in the next few weeks with online-store, blog, pictures, and more!
• and my involvement on the Canadian Organic Growers board of directors, as we looked for a new Executive Director (and found a great new ED!)

But with these commitments almost completed, I’m aiming to post more regularly through 2012. I’ll catch up on a couple of posts I’d planned for 2011: mainly cleaning lettuce seed,  my 2010 trip to Greta’s Organic Seeds, and more comparisons of different garlic types.

Also, the Eastern Canadian Organic Seed Growers Network is planning a big seed conference in Montreal on Nov. 10-11, 2012. I’ll be posting more as the details become clearer.

If there’s anything you want me to write about, do leave a comment or send me an e-mail (goingtoseedblog@gmail.com).

So thanks for reading this past year, and I hope you enjoy the next year of posts!

Restricting seed and chaff flow rate

I use this modified bucket to restrict the amount of material falling at once and pour a steady stream of material in front of the winnowing fans.

I used an old wooden field marker as the bar and fixed it in place with duct tape. This works better on a bucket with straight sides.

Usually the material flows easily through the gap. Sometimes the chaff gets stuck and blocks the flow.

Increasing flow rate

I use a finger to dislodge any stuck material.

Decreasing flow rate

If on the other hand material is going through too quickly, I use my hand to hold some of the chaff back. I might also do this if the chaff threatens to pour over the bar instead of under!

Anybody have any equally handy high-tech seed cleaning equipment?

Also, happy new year!

Four years ago, with some seed saving experience, I tried radishes again with success. The differences in my approach came down to making sure the pods were very dry and not being too delicate with the extraction process (quite the opposite in fact!).

I clean  radish seeds with multiple cycles of threshing, screening and winnow steps in my radish cleaning. This is what I call aggressive seed cleaning and use this approach with seeds that don’t easily shatter (snap beans, and now chicory, fall in this list).

This post covers the radish seed cleaning,  you can read about growing the plants for seed here:

• growing spring and winter radishes
• radishes blooming
• planting radishes

On with the cleaning!

Primary Threshing

We harvest the plants when they’ve dried down in the field. Then let them dry further in the barn

When they are dry, I put the plants in a bin and stomp them with my boots.

I screen out the plant stems and largest material with a 1/2″ screen.

This is what fell through the screen. There are still a lot of whole pods in here.

I run this through a 1/4″ screen. The whole pods stay on top.

This is the chaff and seed (with a few whole pods) that went through the second screen. I leave this in a bin and pay attention to the pods that didn’t fall through.

secondary Threshing

This is what didn’t go through the screen.

I stomp on the pods some more and then screen again the 1/4″ screen. I add what falls through the screen to the bin with what fell through during the previous step. I repeat with any pods that didn’t fall through the mesh.

After a few passes all the plant material has fallen through the 1/4″ screen and is collected in one bin.

I take this bin into the barn.

Winnowing

I transfer the chaff and seed to a bucket and then winnow.

I start with the fans on low-speed and crank the speed each successive pass till I achieve desired results. In the case of radish seed both fans are at high-speed.

I winnow over three bins on a tarp. I can recuperate my seeds if I have a fanning mishap, and also I can see what is being separated at different steps.

The left bin (closest to the fan) is full of seed and non-shattered pods. The bin on the right is full of stems and shattered pods.

Repeat Threshing And Winnowing

I compost the plant matter from the bin on the right and screen the bin on the left with my 1/4″ screen. crushing anything that doesn’t go through with my boots.

After another cycle or two of screening and winnowing, the large plant matter has been removed from the seed.

Only the seeds remain with a few big bits. At this point I take out my specialized radish screen.

Final Screening

This is one of my fine collection of colanders, the square  holes are the right size for radish seed.

I pour the seed into the colander and delicately shake from side to side …

separating the last bits from the seed lot.

I lay the clean seeds on a tray to dry a few more days than bag them up to bring them into the office.

Key Lessons

As you can see I really kick the seeds out of those pods – hence aggressive seed cleaning. Getting the seeds free from the pods is the critical first step in seed cleaning. From that point on screens and fans can do the rest.

Next, I’ll talk about how aggressive winnowing does the job for lettuce seed.

Over the next dozen years, meeting experienced seed growers, reading piles of seed production books,  and attending whatever seed workshops I could find; I gleaned many pearls of wisdom that I then fine-tuned cleaning hundreds, if not thousands, of seed lots.

Here are the steps and lessons that have had the biggest impact in my seed saving career:

10 Steps For Getting Seed As Clean As Possible

1. Make sure plant material is dry, dry, dry before threshing. In Eastern Canada, it can be hard to get a crop to dry in the field. Harvest whole plants when they are 3/4 dry. Spread them on tarps in a greenhouse with fans to increase ventilation and turn them periodically to ensure even drying.
2. Leave dirt in the field. Leave dirty plant roots in the field when you harvest seed crops. It is much easier to not add dirt to your seed than to remove it later.
3. Clean seeds on a dry day. Even if your seed crops are very dry, ambient humidity on an overcast or rainy will make seeds stick to the chaff.
4. Thresh aggressively if seeds don’t easily shatter. Use boots, sticks,  rakes, tractors, and trucks to shatter seeds from pods.
5. Alternate screening and winnowing to blow away the light chaff and separate plant material into 2 groups:
• Threshed seed and small bits of stem, pods, and rocks.
• Larger plant material that contains unthreshed seed.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 with larger plant material until you only have bins of threshed seed with small bits of stem, pods, and rocks that are the same size and weight.
7. Winnow threshed seed aggressively to remove other material of similar size and weight.
8. Screen seed carefully. Seed usually falls through first. Stop screening when most of the seed has fallen through.
9. Be willing to sacrifice seed as you repeat steps 7 and 8. If you focus on getting seed clean rather than on saving every last seed, you can get seed a lot cleaner.
10. Remove any remaining unwanted elements by hand. I usually spread seeds on a baking tray and do a final triage to remove broken and damaged seed, and any other remaining bits.

Seed saving examples

You can see all these principles in action in these two posts:

• Saving brassica seeds
• and saving bean seeds.

And in the next couple of posts I’ll demonstrate these principles for two crops that used to really give me a headache: radishes and lettuce.

Are there any tricks or lessons that really improved your seed saving?

In July, I wrote about storing garlic and how I still had some Silverskin garlic and Porcelain garlic that was 12 months out of the ground. None of that Porcelain garlic is kicking around anymore, but I was curious to see how well these Silverskins are doing after 16 months in storage. I sliced one in half and …

.. still a bit juice and nothing rotting! Wow!

I also found a bulb from the 2009 harvest. That’s 28 months ago. I sliced that one open to compare.

The two bulbs halves on the left are 16 months old.

The bulb half on the right is 28 months old.

Twenty-eight months might be pushing it for storing Silverskin garlic. But half the cloves are still edible! Pretty impressive. No other garlic type keeps this well.

Now, I’ll get back to cleaning my seed workshop.

During the spring of 2009, we had a lot of beautiful turnips in the cold room. On a whim, I decided to plant some out for seed. (Last post I wrote about saving turnip seed.) I’ve been offering the turnip seed I saved in our seed catalog; but when we seed in the  field, we’ve been using both the original bought seed and our seed without paying attention to which rows were which.

This year, Emily grew out a row of the bought seed beside a row of our seed. When she started harvesting the  turnips, she came and found me to show me them.

There was a noticeable difference between the turnips in both rows. The turnips from our seed had a more vivid purple top and much smoother skin than the turnips from the bought seed. Our seed had produced much nicer turnips.

The two turnips on the left are from our seed and  the two on the right are from bought seed.

Why was there a difference?

I imagine that little effort was put into selecting the roots for seed that would only sell for $5 a pound.

When I took the time to choose the best roots for seed, I eliminated some unfavorable gene combinations thus improving the variety.

Where to go from here?

Previously, I have seen differences comparing plants grown from seed we’ve saved with those grown from the original seed – better cold and disease resistance, spicier hot peppers, changes in leaf shape or color. But the difference in the turnips really struck me because I hadn’t seen the previous seed as inferior. In fact, I hadn’t really paid much attention to them because we grow so few every year. But now I wonder what other crops we can quickly improve.

This  change was after one generation of simply choosing what I liked. Imagine what 2-3 generations of selection can do? Or even 10-20 generations?

Have any of you noticed similar improvements in varieties you save seed of?

• Clear up all that confusion about turnips and rutabagas
• Explain how turnips need to be overwintered
• And show how turnips go to seed.

Turnips And Rutabagas

Most people call rutabagas turnips. Turnips and rutabagas are actually two separate vegetables.

Rutabaga on the left, turnip on the right.

Turnips are white fleshed, usually  2-4″ wide, and tender enough to eat raw (they can  also be cooked).  They are from the Brassica rapa species and easily cross with the other members of that species: chinese cabbage, rapini, mizuna, tatsoi, and a number of leafy greens.

Rutabagas are yellow fleshed, 4-8″ wide, and eaten cooked. They are from the  Brassica napus species and won’t cross with turnips. Rutabagas are also known as swedes.

That being said, saving rutabaga seed is done in pretty much the same manner as saving turnip seed . Starting with …

Overwintered Turnips

Turnips are biennials, which means they have a two-year life cycle:

• Year one: they grow a storage root accumulating energy.
• Year two: the root uses that energy to produce a flower stalk, sets seed, then dies.

In our climate, turnips do not overwinter in the ground. To grow turnip seed, you need to dig roots in the fall and store them in a root cellar, fridge or cold room. And that’s where this story begins.

March 2009 – We had a lot of turnips in cold storage and were still bringing them to market.

I chose the nicest roots to re-plant for seed carefully inspecting the top of each root to make sure the growing point was intact. By the time the ground was dry enough to plant, most of the roots had leaves a couple of inches long.

Second Year Turnip Plants

April 24, 2009  – I planted the turnips 3 rows to a bed, 12″ apart in the row; and left the tops above ground. The yellow leaves were hungry for some tasty spring sunshine.

May 4, 2009 – In  just over two weeks, not only had the turnip leaves turned a vibrant green but they were now over a foot long.

May 13, 2009 – The turnip plants were covered in buds ready to open. These are also delicious fried with butter and garlic.

June 11, 2009 – The turnip flowers had just passed their peak

Next Steps

From this point on, saving turnip seed is the same as saving most other brassica seeds. Two of my previous posts cover the specifics of

• Harvesting brassica seed
• Cleaning brassica seed

The turnip story continues next post when we discuss how a generation of saving turnip seed fits into the bigger picture. I can’t wait either!

I love those dry crisp sunny autumn days where the seed crops are brittle and with a stomp or a wack, seed shatters readily from pods, and chaff winnows easily from the seed.  These are the days when I can process seed crop after seed crop, and as the tarps and tarps of pulled plants drying in the barn and greenhouse disappear, my worry levels about mold and ruined seed also disappear; when I begin to accumulate well-labeled paper bags and envelopes to make new piles in my office and living room for future packing; when it becomes clear what seeds will be plentiful for the fall catalogue and what seeds will be running short … On these dry sunny days, the only thing on my mind is seeds.

Tom and Xander threshing bean seed (I posted previously on saving bean seeds)

Of course, today begins another run of rainy days. But the sun’ll be back sooner or later.

On another note, anybody have any great secrets for cleaning chicory seed?

The key step in making this happen is effectively curing garlic plants before trimming the roots or stems.

What is Curing?

Many vegetables need a curing period to prepare for storage. This lets them heal cuts or wounds to their skins and stems, and undergo physiological changes.

• Potatoes need 2-3 weeks at 15-20C to heal cuts and bruises.
• Sweet potatoes need 1 week at 30C
• Squashes from the maxima and moschata species need 2-3 weeks at 20C or so.

For garlic, 2-6 weeks at 25-30C has produced great results on our farm. This seals the juicy garlic goodness in the bulb and keeps any pathogens out.

Curing Garlic

Harvested garlic is brought into a hayloft. This room is warmer than outside and therefore drier. It is also well ventilated, which keeps leaves from rotting while the garlic cures.

We hang bunches of whole garlic plants and do not clean or trim them until they’ve cured. (You can read about last year’s garlic harvest for more details up to this point.)

One Week After Harvest

After one week of curing, the garlic stems are still green. The bulb necks have not yet been sealed.

At this point the garlic tastes great but if you cut the stems off now your garlic might not store more than a few months.

A Few Weeks After Harvest

The stems have completely dried. At this point we trim the roots off the plants, grade our garlic and then begin cleaning. Depending on the size, we cut the stems off some bulbs and leave the stems on those intended for braiding.

Garlic Storage

Once your garlic has cured, store bulbs in a dry place with constant temperature.

Storage life also depends on the garlic  type:

• Rocambole and Artichoke garlic store till February-April
• Porcelains from April-June and even till the end of July
• Silverskins over a year !
• Purple stripes and marbled purple stripes are new to our farm but I think some of them might store as long as porcelains.

(In July, I wrote about garlic that  had stored for almost a year and still tasted great.)

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At this point we’ve processed about 80% of our garlic harvest. I’m slowly shifting my brain over to all the seed crops we’ve been harvesting and still have to harvest, and how to get them cleaned.

Happy September!

We start off by …

Planting Lettuce Outside

We transplanted lettuce to the field in early May – Merlot in the foreground  and Red Oak Lead in the back (most of the subsequent pictures are taken from the opposite side of these beds) . By the end of June, they had reached full size.

Notice the rebar stakes on the edge of the bed? The rebar will support the tunnel arches. We place the rebar before planting to make sure the beds are parallel and fit under the tunnel.

At the end of June we began …

Building A Tunnel Over The Lettuce

We placed arches over the rebar. (We also removed some lettuces leaves to improve ventilation.)

We dug a 6-8″ deep trench along each side of the tunnel.

We strung a rope along the ridge and anchored it to rebar stakes at both ends. (This picture is from another tunnel.)

And then we covered the structure with plastic.

The sides of the plastic are buried, and the ends bunched and tied to the stake holding the ridge line. I used a pair of clips on both sides to keep the door open.

This structure is a lot simpler than our 100-300′ field tunnels. Of course, if you’ve read about our tunnels, you know what happens next.

Watching The Tunnel Collapse

After a particularly windy day. One end of the tunnel collapsed.

So I went and got a couple of 10-foot 2x4s for …

Bracing The Tunnel

I pushed the collapsed tunnel arch back up and shoved the 2×4 into place.

I attached one end with plumbing straps and a self-tapping screw through the arch.

The other side was braced against the bottom of another arch.

And the tunnel has stayed up since!

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Last week the Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue garlic festival was a success. You can see pictures of the Great Garlic Dessert Challenge on the festival’s Facebook page.

Now let’s batten down the hatches and wait for the edge of hurricane Irene to pass through (supposedly a post-tropical storm by the time it hits Quebec) and we’ll see if the lettuce tunnel is still standing tomorrow!